


Sharp the Blade that Wounds the Deepest

by devitaexire



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Shaving, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-16
Updated: 2012-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-29 15:39:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/321479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devitaexire/pseuds/devitaexire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is a game with Jim. Sebastian bends, but never really breaks, no matter how much he wants to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sharp the Blade that Wounds the Deepest

Sebastian hates his life sometimes. The chase, the hunt, the kill is all well and good; when he was in the army he had people who would come and sweep up after him, burn the bodies and sometimes the evidence, but more often than not it wasn’t necessary. These days he does it himself, drags each stinking, rotting husk that needs to be disposed of by hand, because he is nothing if not efficient. Jim can try to dress him like a gentleman, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, if he so wishes, but he can’t blot the decay from Seb’s palms, dig the blood out from under fingernails dragged ragged down to the quick, sometimes filthy with grave-dirt.

But he does it nonetheless, even though the scald of a shower can’t burn clean the sins he wears around his neck as trophies, branded and scarred into his skin like the notches on a prison-cell wall. Because he is told to, because it is required of him that he does as he is told. He makes no pretenses at the fact that he could be the one man that could walk away from James Moriarty if he wished— Not because Jim would let him leave, but rather, because Jim would think it fun dragging him back on his knees. Seb knows he’s on a leash, but sometimes Jim pulls that loose enough for him to almost believe he holds his own bonds.

Not that he would want to cradle his own fate amongst the scum and bile of life on his murderer’s hands. Jim plays him like a game, though, action-reaction. Nothing he does is by accident, right down to when he tears the bloodied Armani from Sebastian’s chest and chokes him with his own tie like a disobedient hound, and Seb could throw the smaller man off his back with ease if he wanted, but half the fun is in biding his time and letting Jim think he’s won. Half the time he wonders if Jim trusts him, or if he’s pretending at that too, waiting for Seb to make a move so he can counter it, purely to humiliate him for having tried.

Right now, Jim has moved (or rather, had Moran move,) one of the stools standing at the bar in his kitchen up into the ensuite bathroom, where he is currently perched. For whatever reason, and Sebastian doesn’t pretend to know the motivations in Jim’s broken-glass-sharp mind, he hasn’t shaved in days.

“We’re going to play a game, Sebastian.” The smaller man informs him, and there are no pretenses at what would happen should he refuse, so he buries his hands in his pocket and keeps silent, doing little other than raising an eyebrow.

“This—” Jim articulates somewhere in the region of his face, and Sebastian knows instantly that he’s talking about his newly acquired beard, however out of place it looks, “Has to go. Go on.”

It seems simple enough; Seb wonders what the catch is. His eyes narrow and he looks around, but seeing nothing, it’s safe enough to pick the cannister of shaving foam up off the worktop and set about spreading it evenly across Jim’s face, even if that is a little odd. Jim himself is odd, and Sebastian is fairly certain that his employer is about to bite him on more than one occasion, but the promise of getting a mouth full of shaving foam seems to deter him, for which Sebastian isn’t sure whether to be grateful or not. He rinses his hands in the lukewarm water of the basin, and reaches for the razor, and resolutely denies that he jumps when Jim’s hand darts out and smacks him hard on the wrist.

“Bor-ing~” He sing-songs, and for a moment Sebastian is confused— What does he want him to do, attempt to remove the hair with his teeth? It’s revealed in an instant when Moriarty removes an object from his pocket and flicks it open, the shiny steel of the straight razor glinting viciously in the bathroom light. Seb doesn’t shake for a second, not between plucking it from his outstretched hand, or turning it between his own fingers— And yes, it’s sharp, he tests the blade and the barest of pressures nicks the calloused pad of his thumb.

“Damascus steel. Do you _like_ it?” Jim confides in a conspiratorial stage-whisper, and for a moment Moran isn’t sure whether the blade is sharper or the smaller man’s scythe-like grin. He thinks he’d be hard pressed to determine. He shrugs his shoulders like he doesn’t care, but touches the metal, still intimately warm from having been in Jim’s pocket, to the man’s cheek, drawing a neat line down through the foam.

“I trust, dear Sebastian, that I don’t have to tell you what will happen should you.. slip.” It’s just enough of a warning to curl hard in Sebastian’s stomach, the part of him that perpetually refuses to answer to anyone rising up in anger before he swallows it without answer, waiting for Jim to stop smirking before he continues. Before long, his cheeks are bare, and Seb sets to start on Jim’s pretty pale neck.

One line is traced through the foam, then a second, and it’s not until the third that he wonders why Jim is doing this. Wonders what it would feel like to slit that ivory throat from ear to ear, to push the steel into his gullet and tear, shredding through his vocal chords, muscle and artery alike like wet tissue paper. He’s done it before, to stronger men than Jim Moriarty. He wonders what it would feel like to have Jim’s blood on his hands, insinuating itself beneath his fingernails, wonders how long it would take to scrub the whorls of his fingerprints clean of the stink of death.

He can practically taste the blood as he imagines it, blooming red like wildfire and consuming the lily white flesh, the crisp snow-fields of his expensive shirt stained crimson. Imagines the surprise, the flicker of fear that most every man has when the darkness consumes him. Most of all, he wonders if it would feel easy, just another notch on a prison-cell wall, or if it would feel like betrayal.

It’s then that he notices that for all his chin is tipped back to expose his throat, Jim’s dark eyes are watching him, and there’s a taunt there, a dare. The taste of blood in his mouth turns to ash turns to sand and is almost suffocating, beyond the roaring silence in his ears so loud it’s deafening him. His fingers itch to curl around that blade and rend, to carve himself into Jim’s soul if he has one left, to claw and tear and burn like the trained monster Jim’s made him into, that he made himself into before that. It’s a burn that he feels in his palm to throw that happy warm blade at the mirror until it smashes into fragments, to wrap his long killer’s fingers around Jim’s throat and squeeze the life out of him. To feel the crush of bone and vein and muscle as intimately as if it were his own.

And Jim, that brilliant, magnificent _bastard_ is laughing at him even as his hand curls around the blade only to close it into the handle, but clever, madman’s hands are wrapping and squeezing until the Damascus steel kisses his palm and then bites like Jim didn’t. And he knows, of course he does, because his laugh, crowing and echoing mirthless and cruel, his laugh is what follows Sebastian through two slammed doors and a whole room full of silence.


End file.
